“But,” he added, “after the war was over, an immense deposit of coal was discovered on a tract of land belonging to my mother. This mine saved our family fortunes.”
Dunlevy had with him in Cambridge the same aged man, the full-blooded negro of the old regime, who, he said, had been his father’s body-servant during the war and who was with him when he was wounded at Manassas. I have mentioned having seen this man in his chambers at the University of Virginia. He was constantly attendant upon Dunlevy. He appeared to worship him and to love him as if he were one of those god-descended heroes about whom the ancients tell us. And Dunlevy on his part seemed to be in perfect contentment with this one man. He said that now that all of his own family were gone, the old fellow was the only remaining human being who connected him with the past. The two seemed inseparable. I state these things about him, because Dunlevy makes reference to one “Sandy” in his papers and I want it to be clear that it is to this aged family retainer he refers. Moreover, when persons told me, as I relate below, that no one would answer Dunlevy’s door—that door with hinges oiled lest their creaking grate upon his nerves—I used to take it to mean that he had instructed Sandy to pay no heed to their calls unless he bade him.
And now for the stories about his being dissipated. Gossip said that Dunlevy was what is known as a solitary drinker. Students who roomed in the same dormitory with him said that he barricaded his doors and would not answer knocks for days at a time. That when they first met him upon his coming to Harvard at the beginning of the college year, he used to make engagements with them and then invariably break his appointments at the last moment by sending Sandy with a scrap of paper looking as if it had been taken out of a waste-basket and scribbled upon in the extremity of indecision.
In regard to these insinuations, I can only speak of my own experience. On three occasions (two of them were appointments) I went to Dunlevy’s door and I tapped and I knocked and I pronounced words in vain like Ali Baba’s brother in the robbers’ cave. Another night late, I went unexpectedly to his door and met the janitor of the dormitory coming out of his rooms. He said that a student had told him that he saw flames coming out of Mr. Dunlevy’s windows. I supposed it was merely a practical joke that some undergraduates had put upon the janitor in order to disturb Dunlevy. I prevailed upon the janitor to let me enter, as he said that Mr. Dunlevy was within.
“I have brought you over that work on Ethics about which I spoke to you yesterday at the philosophy lecture,” I said, entering his study and finding him in a long silk dressing gown and wearing a pair of stunted Chinese slippers. He had in his hand a tumbler full to the brim of a heavy mixture.
“Oh!” he exclaimed, as if he had received a shock, and was momentarily pausing over his surprise, “how the devil did you get in here?”
“The janitor let me in,” I explained; “I met him at your door as he was going out.”
“Oh—that was it—was it? Well—a—sit down, won’t you? This is a funny get-up you’ve found me in—isn’t it? You wouldn’t think to see me in street attire that I wore this sort of thing—would you? I say, a—have a drink, eh?”
I said that I would have a glass with him, at which he appeared to be rather taken off his guard and confused.